Bitcoin Mining and the things you need to do it at home

The sudden boom in cryptocurrency prices especially Bitcoin has seen a much larger interest by the public in the crypto sector. Everyone who hadn’t even heard of the term cryptocurrency now knows about Bitcoin and how it has made some people rich over-night. But then with the Bitcoin price already very high, it is not feasible for everyone to buy one Bitcoin if not a dozen. The solution? Why not mine your very own!

Yes, you can mine your own Bitcoins but sadly it won’t be much feasible as it was before. There was a time once when people could mine Bitcoins worth millions of dollars today using even their old laptops. Though with time the Bitcoin Mining complexity grew, and people had to opt for powerful GPUs and since a couple of years, powerful mining hardware is required to Bitcoin to mine ‘sufficient’ Bitcoin. And this becomes harder every minute.

Golden Days of Bitcoin Mining are over

Though, there are obviously caveats involved even when you can afford such an expensive hardware based on ASIC chips. These require a lot of power which shall put a huge load on your electricity bill and generate a lot of heat, so you will probably need to expense on a way to cool them down too. Moreover, these machines, however powerful they may be, they are obsolete by the day as Bitcoin mining becomes difficult.

In spite of this, it still can’t stop you from mining Bitcoin. You can still mine Bitcoin starting from your very own laptop. Though, the amount you can mine would really be negligible. On the contrary, with Bitcoin prices reaching an all-time high of nearly 19 thousand USD, whatever the amount of Bitcoin you may mine, might hold some great future value.

As for how to start mining your very own Bitcoins, let’s go through it step by step.

A secure Bitcoin wallet is a must to protect your tokens.

Like you put your money in a wallet to make it safe and so that it won’t get lost in the pockets or slip out, similarly, you need have a secure Bitcoin wallet address. To access the wallet you would also need a private key password.

You need not worry about the whole Bitcoin transactions fully visible to the public since they still can’t access your wallet unless they have the private key password. Like any Bank account, only you can see your wallet. You can choose your wallet from a choice of four ways.

You can have a wallet locally stored on your computer, or your smartphone. Or you can opt for an online service to secure your coins. If these don’t suit you then you can even buy a physical wallet. These physical wallets are similar to a USB Flashdrive or HDD for instance.

Instead of keeping your Bitcoins on the exchange you should make the habit of keeping them in your wallet. This would keep your coins safe and secure in the case that an exchange is hacked, which they do by the way sometimes, but your wallet will always be a safe place.

If you have a hard time choosing which of the four ways to choose your wallet, then you should go and have a look at Bitcoin.org which gives a good comparison.

Only Powerful Mining Hardware would make it feasible to mine Bitcoins

You would have probably heard the word blockchain. It is a data set of calculations on the Bitcoin network which are to be performed by contributions all over the system. The reward for mining Bitcoin is pretty less though: The miners just earn around 12.5 bitcoins each time a blockchain is successfully mined. These bitcoins are not for each miner but are to be distributed amongst them.

Not only does it require more powerful hardware not but the reward has decreased too substantially over the years. This was how Bitcoin was meant to be from the start. You are better off with a Bitcoin mining calculator to see if it is now feasible for you to mine Bitcoin with a large investment or not.

Bitcoin mining on your own is not feasible at ALL

If you think about the mining bitcoin all on your own then you should drop the idea right away. It would take years for you to mine a single Bitcoin given the circumstances. The alternative is to join a Bitcoin Mining pool.

Basically, you shall be mining a block in a group rather than solo. This way the combined computing power by each miner would make mining altogether rather quick. Though the rewards would be distributed based on power contribution and rather small, they would be much more frequent. Take a look at The Bitcoin Wiki if you want to compare different mining pools.

Now to the mining, yeah, you need the right Mining Software

You need a software to mine Bitcoins, which is called a Mining Client. It will be running on your computer, making use of the processing power provided by the Mining Rig. The client would rather depend on the kind of rig you have set up and your PC make. The famous names in the Bitcoin mining client industry are BFGminer, CGminer, and BTCMiner. Now that this is settled, let’s get to the best part…

Mine your first Bitcoin!

The rest is pretty simple. Just plug in your mining rig and open your mining client which is compatible with the set up you have. Now, you just need to enter the address and password of the mining pool which you have selected. The mining pool can be your friends too. Then leave it up to the mining rig and your PC to ultimately mine for you your very first Bitcoin!

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